How Megan Goethals Got Her Groove Back

When waif-like doesn't equal an eating disorder

Her stomach began its assault in earnest last September. Deprived of enough fat, enough food, with anxiety and a calorie-sucking 75-miles-a-week summer to boot, the nerves and stomach lining didn't know quite what to do with themselves. So they grew listless, got lazy. And when good, fatty food made its way in again, her stomach erupted in gut-twisting cramps because it took too much work to break down. Megan Goethals had dug herself a hole.

In the two years it took to dig it, the hole was filled instead with the "dread nervous"-Goethals' term for pre-race jitters, void of all excitement, made up only of the fear of being beaten. Being beaten was something that usually never happened-not at the state meets, track nationals, Foot Locker Nationals-during the four years she ran for Rochester High School in Michigan.

Which meant Goethals never had a break. Heading into her freshman year at the University of Washington, the dread nervous and the hole she couldn't fill depleted what little energy she had. After her debut at the Sundodger Invitational and less-than-stellar follow-up at the Notre Dame Invitational, message boards spat vitriol about her malnourished frame. When she couldn't keep up with anyone on the team during practice, when mile 1 of an easy 6-miler drained her tank, coach Greg Metcalf redshirted the young star. The naturally slight girl was all but disappearing, as were her prospects for a college career.

Her freshman season of cross country was over. Message boards swelled with hubris, believing they'd called the final round of a high school great. But give Goethals a goal and she doesn't waver. The energy she'd put into running found its way into making herself better. Which made her healthier. Heavier. Stronger. And wouldn't you know it, faster.

Managing the expectations of a young star entering her freshman season of college cross country is no enviable task. Metcalf should know. He recruited a freshman class of rock stars that included Nike Cross Nationals champ Katie Flood and California stars Megan Morgan, Chloe Curtis and Liberty Miller, who came in vying for the top position vacated by Kendra Schaaf, the 2009 NCAA Cross Country Division I runner-up who transferred to North Carolina. None were more ready than Goethals.

"If nationals had taken place in August, I would have made top 10 easily," she says, and then laughs. "Too bad it's in November." Goethals, with her almond eyes and an oversized smile that comes on quickly when she talks track, has a confidence that doesn't come naturally to an 18-year-old. She's candid and matter-of-fact, but pairs it with the quick patter of an excitable freshman that is as fast-paced as her walk and the pendulum of her long, chestnut braid.

During the summer of 2010, she ran a 10:01 to win New Balance Nationals, then the second-fastest 2-mile time in U.S. history, then took two weeks off before ramping up her volume to 75 miles a week in preparation to start her freshman year at UW as the No. 1 runner. Not on the team. In the country. If you give anything to freshmen, it's their tenacity to dream big.

"She was nail-sharp," Metcalf says. "But her best day was the first day of fall practice."

Goethals soon learned that even though she was running similar mileage to what she did in high school, her workouts were much faster. And easy days don't exist for a freshman trying to prove herself. She was working hard, running fast and eating 3,500 calories a day. The amount she thought was enough. Two years of that kind of thinking-underestimating the calorie furnace of a runner's body-meant that every day her body fell into a tiny debt. Her frame began to show it when her running didn't, the skeletal build that signals the countdown of a career.

During her senior year of high school, college coaches made calls to Rochester coach Larry Adams to let him know they wouldn't be recruiting her because of her size. Some refused to return Goethal's calls. "They didn't even ask if I had a problem. They saw pictures and assumed," she says.

"Look at any picture of my father or sister, and it's obvious that we're all built the exact same way.

"I was not trying to drop weight," Goethals says. "I've always been underweight and saw a nutritionist in high school, but I kept upping my mileage because of the 'Foot Locker Curse'-you know, whoever wins Foot Locker doesn't do well in college-and I wanted to break it, so I trained so hard. Too hard." Day to day she didn't see the difference, but she began to feel it.

Metcalf brought up the topic of Goethals' weight from the start. He asked if she had an issue, if she was always this tiny, and convinced, decided to take her on. And last September, when the hole got as deep as it could and the walk-ons began to beat her during practice, Metcalf assembled a team of professionals-nutritionist, psychiatrist, trainer and doctor-who dubbed themselves "Team Megan." Her first meeting with the psychiatrist was to the point.

"She told me I'd have to work hard to race again and had to accept that I may never recover," says Goethals. "From the beginning, I knew I was working to beat the odds." She was relegated to running 30 minutes a day, up to six days a week. In other words, torture for Goethals.

"She also figured out that I had OCD," says Goethals. What she thought were running superstitions-eating the same things, following the exact same routine-turned out to be more compulsory than luck. "My life changed so much that fall. It freaked me out and put me into a depression. I got really bad anxiety and couldn't sleep at night. Everything was crashing down at once."

On top of it, she made the rookie mistake of reading comments under her online interviews or threads on LetsRun.com. "Those comments just crushed me. I so badly wanted to respond, to tell them I wasn't 'intentionally starving myself,'" says Goethals, shaking her head. "They always post as "Anonymous Coward" or something-they're just old people who wish they could compete again and have nothing better to do than tear young girls apart." And kick them when they're down. Metcalf instituted a ban on the online comments and told her from then on, what she saw would be used as ammunition to come back and prove everybody wrong.

Last October, Goethals began her new diet: bigger portions, Odwalla smoothies, protein shakes, cans of Ensure at night. The extra 1,000 calories would put her at 4,500 calories a day.

"My nutritionist worked in liquid stuff because sometimes it seems like your stomach-and jaw-can handle only so much physical food." It took three months for her to gain a pound and a half.

"I was so depressed. I was doing all of this work and I was only running one-third of what I usually ran, and nothing was happening," she says. Then over Christmas break, her body acquiesced. She went from feeling terrible to, one day later, feeling totally fine. "It was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. It was the best day of my life," says Goethals. The pounds came back and her energy returned. Metcalf let her run with the girls when she returned to Washington in January.

Compare an interview at her first indoor race to her last cross country race and the difference is striking. Rosy cheeks color her face. There's a brightness to her voice. The enthusiasm is overwhelming. She ran 9:18 to open in the 3,000m at the Flotrack Husky Classic, ran 9:11 in the UW last chance meet, and took the title at the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Championship. But her debut in the 5,000m at the Stanford Invitational proved more than anything that Goethals had returned to form.

"That she could run a 16:06 in her outdoor debut is a testament to tremendous heart and desire," says Metcalf. "When you talk about great athletes, Megan has all the pieces."

I have this white board that we use to talk about her entire career, five or six years down the road," says Metcalf. "Megan has an elite athlete mentality-heart, desire, will. You can't teach or coach that desire to dive for the tape at the end of a race."

What you can teach a freshman? The basics: more mileage does not necessarily equal better performance; trust your coach, show up and don't think about the workouts; and never, ever one-step or cut off your teammates. Her 50-mile weeks and blind trust have made her a faster runner. Learning to run in a pack-something she never had to do before-has earned her close-knit friendships. Her success in making herself better made Team Megan moot. Putting it all together got her to the NCAA 5,000m finals during the outdoor season.

On June 10, she ran 15:47 to take sixth place. Just out of her top-3 goal, but nailing her fastest time yet. The race went out hard, stayed hard and left all tactics at the start line. It wasn't something Goethals anticipated, so she held on and didn't worry about it. She let Villanova's Sheila Reid and some of the other girls go on the last two laps because she had no choice. She's learning. She still looks smaller than some of the others in the field, and that may be something that doesn't change. The hole is gone and the nerves are firing. Her forecast looks good.